Whether it is attainable, how it can be attained, and
what sort of world a world at peace will have to be.

First Published . . January 1940.

1

THE END OF AN AGE

IN THIS SMALL BOOK I want
to set down as compactly, clearly and usefully as possible the gist of
what I have learnt about war and peace in the course of my life. I am not
going to write peace propaganda here. I am going to strip down certain
general ideas and realities of primary importance to their framework, and
so prepare a nucleus of useful knowledge for those who have to go on with
this business of making a world peace. I am not going to persuade people
to say "Yes, yes" for a world peace; already we have had far too
much abolition of war by making declarations and signing resolutions;
everybody wants peace or pretends to want peace, and there is no need to
add even a sentence more to the vast volume of such ineffective stuff. I
am simply attempting to state the things we must do and the price we must
pay for world peace if we really intend to achieve it.

Until the Great War, the
First World War, I did not bother very much about war and peace. Since
then I have almost specialised upon this problem. It is not very easy to
recall former states of mind out of which, day by day and year by year,
one has grown, but I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but
most of my generation - in the British Empire, America, France and indeed
throughout most of the civilised world - thought that war was dying out.

So it seemed to us. It
was an agreeable and therefore a readily acceptable idea. We imagined the
Franco-German War of 1870-71 and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 were the
final conflicts between Great Powers, that now there was a Balance of
Power sufficiently stable to make further major warfare impracticable. A
Triple Alliance faced a Dual Alliance and neither had much reason for
attacking the other. We believed war was shrinking to mere expeditionary
affairs on the outskirts of our civilisation, a sort of frontier police
business. Habits of tolerant intercourse, it seemed, were being
strengthened every year that the peace of the Powers remained unbroken.

There was in deed a mild
armament race going on; mild by our present standards of equipment; the
armament industry was a growing and enterprising on; but we did not see
the full implication of that; we preferred to believe that the increasing
general good sense would be strong enough to prevent these multiplying
guns from actually going off and hitting anything. And we smiled
indulgently at uniforms and parades and army manœuvres. They were the
time-honoured toys and regalia of kings and emperors. They were part of
the display side of life and would never get to actual destruction and
killing. I do not think that exaggerates the easy complacency of, let us
say, 1895, forty-five years ago. It was a complacency that lasted with
most of us up to 1914. In 1914 hardly anyone in Europe or America below
the age of fifty had seen anything of war in his own country.

The world before 1900
seemed to be drifting steadily towards a tacit but practical unification.
One could travel without a passport over the larger part of Europe; the
Postal Union delivered one’s letters uncensored and safely from Chile to
China; money, based essentially on gold, fluctuated only very slightly;
and the sprawling British Empire still maintained a tradition of free
trade, equal treatment and open-handedness to all comers round and about
the planet. In the United States you could go for days and never see a
military uniform. Compared with to-day that was, upon the surface at any
rate, an age of easy-going safety and good humour. Particularly for the
North Americans and the Europeans.

But apart from that
steady, ominous growth of the armament industry there were other and
deeper forces at work that were preparing trouble. The Foreign Offices of
the various sovereign states had not forgotten the competitive traditions
of the eighteenth century. The admirals and generals were contemplating
with something between hostility and fascination, the hunger weapons the
steel industry was gently pressing into their hands. Germany did not share
the self-complacency of the English-speaking world; she wanted a place in
the sun; there was increasing friction about the partition of the raw
material regions of Africa; the British suffered from chronic Russophobia
with regard to their vast apportions in the East, and set themselves to
nurse Japan into a modernised imperialist power; and also they
"remembered Majuba"; the United States were irritated by the
disorder of Cuba and felt that the weak, extended Spanish possessions
would be all the better for a change of management. So the game of Power
Politics went on, but it went on upon the margins of the prevailing peace.
There were several wars and changes of boundaries, but they involved no
fundamental disturbance of the general civilised life; they did not seem
to threaten its broadening tolerations and understandings in any
fundamental fashion. Economic stresses and social trouble stirred and
muttered beneath the orderly surfaces of political life, but threatened no
convulsion. The idea of altogether eliminating war, of clearing what was
left of it away, was in the air, but it was free from any sense of
urgency. The Hague Tribunal was established and there was a steady
dissemination of the conceptions of arbitration and international law. It
really seemed to many that the peoples of the earth were settling down in
their various territories to a litigious rather than a belligerent order.
If there was much social injustice it was being mitigated more and more by
a quickening sense of social decency. Acquisitiveness conducted itself
with decorum and public-spiritedness was in fashion. Some of it was quite
honest public-spiritedness.

In those days, and they
are hardly more than half a lifetime behind us, no one thought of any sort
of world administration. That patchwork of great Powers and small Powers
seemed the most reasonable and practicable method of running the business
of mankind. Communications were far too difficult for any sort of
centralised world controls. Around the World in Eighty Days, when it was
published seventy years ago, seemed an extravagant fantasy. It was a world
without telephone or radio, with nothing swifter than a railway train or
more destructive than the earlier types of H.E. shell. They were marvels.
It was far more convenient to administer that world of the Balance of
Power in separate national areas and, since there were such limited
facilities for peoples to get at one another and do each other mischiefs,
there seemed no harm in ardent patriotism and the complete independence of
separate sovereign states.

Economic life was largely
directed by irresponsible private businesses and private finance which,
because of their private ownership, were able to spread out their unifying
transactions in a network that paid little attention to frontiers and
national, racial or religious sentimentality. "Business" was
much more of a world commonwealth than the political organisations. There
were many people, especially in America, who imagined that
"Business" might ultimately unify the world and governments sink
into subordination to its network.

Nowadays we can be wise
after the event and we can see that below this fair surface of things,
disruptive forces were steadily gathering strength. But these disruptive
forces played a comparatively small rôle in the world spectacle of half a
century ago, when the ideas of that older generation which still dominates
our political life and the political education of its successors, were
formed. It is from the conflict of those Balance of Power and private
enterprise ideas, half a century old, that one of the main stresses of our
time arises. These ideas worked fairly well in their period and it is
still with extreme reluctance that our rulers, teachers, politicians, face
the necessity for a profound mental adaptation of their views, methods and
interpretations to these disruptive forces that once seemed so negligible
and which are now shattering their old order completely.

It was because of this
belief in a growing good-will among nations, because of the general
satisfaction with things as they were, that the German declarations of war
in 1914 aroused such a storm of indignation throughout the entire
comfortable world. It was felt that the German Kaiser had broken the
tranquillity of the world club, wantonly and needlessly. The war was
fought "against the Hohenzollerns." They were to be expelled
from the club, certain punitive fines were to be paid and all would be
well. That was the British idea of 1914. This out-of-date war business was
then to be cleared up once for all by a mutual guarantee by all the more
respectable members of the club through a League of Nations. There was no
apprehension of any deeper operating causes in that great convulsion on
the part of the worthy elder statesmen who made the peace. And so
Versailles and its codicils.

For twenty years the
disruptive forces have gone on growing beneath the surface of that genteel
and shallow settlement, and twenty years there has been no resolute attack
upon the riddles with which their growth confronts us. For all that period
of the League of Nations has been the opiate of liberal thought in the
world.

To-day there is war to
get rid of Adolf Hitler, who has now taken the part of the Hohenzollerns
in the drama. He too has outraged the Club Rules and he too is to be
expelled. The war, the Chamberlain-Hitler War, is being waged so far by
the British Empire in quite the old spirit. It has learnt nothing and
forgotten nothing. There is the same resolute disregard of any more
fundamental problem.

Still the minds of our
comfortable and influential ruling-class people refuse to accept the plain
intimation that their time is over, that the Balance of Power and
uncontrolled business methods cannot continue, and that Hitler, like the
Hohenzollerns, is a mere offensive pustule on the face of a deeply ailing
world. To get rid of him and his Nazis will be no more a cure for the
world’s ills than scraping will heal measles. The disease will manifest
itself in some new eruption. It is the system of nationalist individualism
and unco-ordinated enterprise that is the world’s disease, and it is the
whole system that has to go. It has to be reconditioned down to its
foundations or replaced. It cannot hope to "muddle through"
amiably, wastefully and dangerously, a second time.

World peace means all
that much revolution. More and more of us begin to realise that it cannot
mean less.

The first thing,
therefore that has to be done in thinking out the primary problems of
world peace is to realise this, that we are living in the end of a
definite period of history, the period of the sovereign states. As we used
to say in the eighties with ever-increasing truth: "We are in an age
of transition". Now we get some measure of the acuteness of the
transition. It is a phase of human life which may lead, as I am trying to
show, either to a new way of living for our species or else to a longer or
briefer dégringolade of violence, misery, destruction, death and the
extinction of mankind. These are not rhetorical phrases I am using here; I
mean exactly what I say, the disastrous extinction of mankind.

That is the issue before
us. It is no small affair of parlour politics we have to consider. As I
write, in the moment, thousands of people are being killed, wounded,
hunted, tormented, ill-treated, delivered up to the most intolerable and
hopeless anxiety and destroyed morally and mentally, and there is nothing
in sight at present to arrest this spreading process and prevent its
reaching you and yours. It is coming for you and yours now at a great
pace. Plainly in so far as we are rational foreseeing creatures there is
nothing for any of us now but to make this world peace problem the ruling
interest and direction of our lives. If we run away from it it will pursue
and get us. We have to face it. We have to solve it or be destroyed by it.
It is as urgent and comprehensive as that.

2

OPEN CONFERENCE

BEFORE WE EXAMINE WHAT I
have called so far the "disruptive forces" in the current social
order, let me underline one primary necessity for the most outspoken free
discussion of the battling organisations and the crumbling institutions
amidst which we lead our present uncomfortable and precarious lives. There
must be no protection for leaders and organisations from the most
searching criticism, on the plea that out country is or may be at war. Or
on any pretence. We must talk openly, widely and plainly. The war is
incidental; the need for revolutionary reconstruction is fundamental. None
of us are clear as yet upon some of the most vital questions before us, we
are not lucid enough in our own minds to be ambiguous, and a mumbling
tactfulness and indirect half-statements made with an eye upon some
censor, will confuse our thoughts and the thoughts of those with whom we
desire understanding, to the complete sterilisation and defeat of every
reconstructive effort.

We want to talk and tell
exactly what our ideas and feelings are, not only to our fellow citizens,
but to our allies, to neutrals and, above all, to the people who are
marshalled in arms against us. We want to get the same sincerity from
them. Because until we have worked out a common basis of ideas with them,
peace will be only an uncertain equilibrium while fresh antagonisms
develop.

Concurrently with this
war we need a great debate. We want every possible person in the world to
take part in that debate. It is something much more important than the
actual warfare. It is intolerable to think of this storm of universal
distress leading up to nothing but some "conference" of
diplomatists out of touch with the world, with secret sessions, ambiguous
"understandings." . . . Not twice surely can that occur. And yet
what is going to prevent its recurring?

It is quite easy to
define the reasonable limits of censorship in a belligerent country. It is
manifest that the publication of any information likely to be of the
slightest use to an enemy must be drastically anticipated and suppressed;
not only direct information, for example, but intimations and careless
betrayals about the position and movements of ships, troops, camps, depots
of munitions, food supplies, and false reports of defeats and victories
and coming shortages, anything that may lead to blind panic and hysteria,
and so forth and so on. But the matter takes on a different aspect
altogether when it comes to statements and suggestions that may affect
public opinion in one’s own country or abroad, and which may help us
towards wholesome and corrective political action.

One of the more
unpleasant aspects of a state of war under modern conditions is the
appearance of a swarm of individuals, too clever by half, in positions of
authority. Excited, conceited, prepared to lie, distort and generally
humbug people into states of acquiescence, resistance, indignation,
vindictiveness, doubt and mental confusion, states of mind supposed to be
conductive to a final military victory. These people love to twist and
censor facts. It gives them a feeling of power; if they cannot create they
can at least prevent and conceal. Particularly they poke themselves in
between us and the people with whom we are at war to distort any possible
reconciliation. They sit, filled with the wine of their transitory powers,
aloof from the fatigues and dangers of conflict, pulling imaginary strings
in people’s minds.

In Germany popular
thought is supposed to be under the control of Herr Dr Goebbels; in Great
Britain we writers have been invited to place ourselves at the disposal of
some Ministry of Information, that is to say at the disposal of hitherto
obscure and unrepresentative individuals, and write under its advice.
Officials from the British Council and the Conservative Party Headquarters
appear in key positions in this Ministry of Information. That curious and
little advertised organisation I have just mentioned, the creation I am
told of Lord Lloyd, that British Council, sends emissaries abroad,
writers, well-dressed women and other cultural personages, to lecture,
charm and win over foreign appreciation for British characteristics, for
British scenery, British political virtues and so forth. Somehow this is
supposed to help something or other. Quietly, unobtrusively, this has gone
on. Maybe these sample British give unauthorised assurances but probably
they do little positive harm. But they ought not to be employed at all.
Any government propaganda is contrary to the essential spirit of
democracy. The expression of opinion and collective thought should be
outside the range of government activities altogether. It should be the
work of free individuals whose prominence is dependent upon the response
and support of the general mind.

But here I have to make
amends to Lord Lloyd. I was led to believe that the British Council was
responsible for Mr. Teeling, the author of Crisis for Christianity, and I
said as much in The Fate of Homo Sapiens. I now unsay it. Mr. Teeling, I
gather, was sent out upon his journeys by a Catholic newspaper. The
British Council was entirely innocent of him.

It is not only that the
Ministries of Information and Propaganda do their level best to divert the
limited gifts and energies of such writers, lecturers and talkers as we
possess, to the production of disingenuous muck that will muddle the
public mind and mislead the enquiring foreigner, but that they show a
marked disposition to stifle any free and independent utterances that my
seem to traverse their own profound and secret plans for the salvation of
mankind.

Everywhere now it is
difficult to get adequate, far-reaching publicity for outspoken discussion
of the way the world is going, and the political, economic and social
forces that carry us along. This is not so much due to deliberate
suppression as to the general disorder into which human affairs are
dissolving. There is indeed in the Atlantic world hardly a sign as yet of
that direct espionage upon opinion that obliterates the mental life of the
intelligent Italian or German or Russian to-day almost completely; one may
still think what one likes, say what one likes and write what one likes,
but nevertheless there is already an increasing difficulty in getting
bold, unorthodox views heard and read. Newspapers are afraid upon all
sorts of minor counts, publishers, with such valiant exceptions as the
publishers of this matter, are morbidly discreet; they get Notice D to
avoid this or that particular topic; there are obscure boycotts and trade
difficulties hindering the wide diffusion of general ideas in countless
ways. I do not mean there is any sort of organised conspiracy to suppress
discussion, but I do say that the Press, the publishing and bookselling
organisations in our free countries, provide a very ill-organised and
inadequate machinery for the ventilation and distribution of thought.

Publishers publish for
nothing but safe profits; it would astound a bookseller to tell him he was
part of the world’s educational organisation or a publisher’s
traveller, that he existed for any other purpose than to book maximum
orders for best sellers and earn a record commission - letting the other
stuff, the highbrow stuff and all that, go hang. They do not understand
that they ought to put public service before gain. They have no inducement
to do so and no pride in their function. Theirs is the morale of a
profiteering world. Newspapers like to insert brave-looking articles of
conventional liberalism, speaking highly of peace and displaying a noble
vagueness about its attainment; now we are at war they will publish the
fiercest attacks upon the enemy - because such attacks are supposed to
keep up the fighting spirit of the country; but any ideas that are really
loudly and clearly revolutionary they dare not circulate at all. Under
these baffling conditions there is no thorough discussion of the world
outlook whatever, anywhere. The democracies are only a shade better than
the dictatorships in this respect. It is ridiculous to represent them as
realms of light at issue with darkness.

This great debate upon
the reconstruction of the world is a thing more important and urgent than
the war, and there exist no adequate media for the utterance and criticism
and correction of any broad general convictions. There is a certain
fruitless and unproductive spluttering of constructive ideas, but there is
little sense of sustained enquiry, few real interchanges, inadequate
progress, nothing is settled, nothing is dismissed as unsound and nothing
is won permanently. No one seems to hear what anyone else is saying. That
is because there is no sense of an audience for these ideologists. There
is no effective audience saying rudely and obstinately: "What A. has
said, seems important. Will B. and C., instead of bombinating in the void,
tell us exactly where and why they differ from A.? And now we have got to
the common truth of A., B., C., and D. Here is F. saying something. Will
he be so good as to correlate what he has to say with A., B., C., and
D.?"

But there is no such
background of an intelligently observant and critical world audience in
evidence. There are a few people here and there reading and thinking in
disconnected fragments. This is all the thinking our world is doing in the
face of planetary disaster. The universities, bless them! are in uniform
or silent.

We need to air our own
minds; we need frank exchanges, if we are to achieve any common
understanding. We need to work out a clear conception of the world order
we would prefer to this present chaos, we need to dissolve or compromise
upon our differences so that we may set our faces with assurance towards
an attainable world peace. The air is full of the panaceas of half-wits,
none listening to the others and most of them trying to silence the others
in their impatience. Thousands of fools are ready to write us a complete
prescription for our world troubles. Will people never realise their own
ignorance and incompleteness, from which arise this absolute necessity for
the plainest statement of the realities of the problem, for the most
exhaustive and unsparing examination of differences of opinion, and for
the most ruthless canvassing of every possibility, however unpalatable it
may seem at first, of the situation?

Before anything else,
therefore, in this survey of the way to world peace, I put free speech and
vigorous publication. It is the thing best worth fighting for. It is the
essence of your personal honour. It is your duty as a world citizen to do
what you can for that. You have not only to resist suppressions, you have
to fight your way out of the fog. If you find your bookseller or newsagent
failing to distribute any type of publication whatever - even if you are
in entire disagreement with the views of that publication - you should
turn the weapon of the boycott upon the offender and find another
bookseller or newsagent for everything you read. The would-be world
citizen should subscribe also to such organisation as the National Council
for Civil Liberties; he should use any advantage his position may give him
to check suppression of free speech; and he should accustom himself to
challenge nonsense politely but firmly and say fearlessly and as clearly
as possible what is in his mind and to listen as fearlessly to whatever is
said to him. So that he may know better either through reassurance or
correction. To get together with other people to argue and discuss, to
think and organise and then implement thought is the first duty of every
reasonable man.

This world of ours is
going to pieces. It has to be reconstructed and it can only be effectively
reconstructed in the light. Only the free, clear, open mind can save us,
and these difficulties and obstructions on our line of thought are as evil
as children putting obstacles on a railway line or scattering nails on an
automobile speed track.

This great world debate
must go on, and it must go on now. Now while the guns are still thudding,
is the time for thought. It is incredibly foolish to talk as so many
people do of ending the war and then having a World Conference to
inaugurate a new age. So soon as the fighting stops the real world
conference, the live discussion, will stop, too. The diplomats and
politicians will assemble with an air of profound competence and close the
doors upon the outer world and resume - Versailles. While the silenced
world gapes and waits upon their mysteries.

3

DISRUPTIVE FORCES

AND NOW LET US come to
the disruptive forces that have reduced that late-nineteenth-century dream
of a powerful world patchwork of more and more civilised states linked by
an ever-increasing financial and economic interdependence, to complete
incredibility, and so forced upon every intelligent mind the need to work
out a new conception of the World that ought to be. It is supremely
important that the nature of these disruptive forces should be clearly
understood and kept in mind. To grasp them is to hold the clues to the
world’s present troubles. To forget about them, even for a moment, is to
lose touch with essential reality and drift away into minor issues.

The first group of these
forces is what people are accustomed to speak of as "the abolition of
distance" and "the change of scale" in human operations.
This "abolition of distance" began rather more than a century
ago, and its earlier effects were not disruptive at all. It knit together
the spreading United States of America over distances that might otherwise
have strained their solidarity to the breaking-point, and it enabled the
sprawling British Empire to sustain contacts round the whole planet.

The disruptive influence
of the abolition of distance appeared only later. Let us be clear upon its
essential significance. For what seemed like endless centuries the
swiftest means of locomotion had been the horse on the high-road, the
running man, the galley and the uncertain, weather-ruled sailing ship.
(There was the Dutchman on skates on skates on his canals, but that was an
exceptional culmination of speed and not for general application.) The
political, social and imaginative life of man for all those centuries was
adapted to these limiting conditions. They determined the distances to
which marketable goods could conveniently be sent, the limits to which the
ruler could send his orders and his solders, the bounds set to getting
news, and indeed the whole scale of living. There could be very little
real community feeling beyond the range of frequent intercourse.

Human life fell naturally
therefore into areas determined by the interplay between these limitations
and such natural obstacles as seas and mountains. Such countries as
France, England, Egypt, Japan, appeared and reappeared in history like
natural, necessary things, and though there were such larger political
efforts as the Roman Empire, they never attained an enduring unity. The
Roman Empire held together like wet blotting-paper; it was always falling
to pieces. The older Empires, beyond their national nuclei, were mere
precarious tribute-levying powers. What I have already called the world
patchwork of the great and little Powers, was therefore, under the old
horse-and-foot and sailing-ship conditions, almost as much a matter of
natural necessity as the sizes of trees and animals.

Within a century all this
has been changed and we have still to face up to what that change means
for us.

First came steam, the
steam-railway, the steamship, and then in a quickening crescendo came the
internal combustion engine, electrical traction, the motor car, the motor
boat, the aeroplane, the transmission of power from central power
stations, the telephone, the radio. I feel apologetic in reciting this
well-known story. I do so in order to enforce the statement that all the
areas that were the most convenient and efficient for the old, time-honoured
way of living, became more and more inconveniently close and narrow for
the new needs. This applied to every sort of administrative area, from
municipalities and urban districts and the range of distributing
businesses, up to sovereign states. They were - and for the most part they
still are - too small for the new requirements and far too close together.
All over the social layout this tightening-up and squeezing together is an
inconvenience, but when it comes to the areas of sovereign states it
becomes impossibly dangerous. It becomes an intolerable thing; human life
cannot go on, with the capitals of most of the civilised countries of the
world within an hour’s bombing range of their frontiers, behind which
attacks can be prepared and secret preparations made without any form of
control. And yet we are still tolerant and loyal to arrangements that seek
to maintain this state of affairs and treat it as though nothing else were
possible.

The present war for and
against Hitler and Stalin and Mr. Chamberlain and so forth, does not even
touch upon the essential problem of the abolition of distance. It may
indeed destroy everything and still settle nothing. If one could wipe out
all the issues of the present conflict, we should still be confronted with
the essential riddle, which is the abolition of the boundaries of most
existing sovereign states and their merger in some larger Pax. We have to
do that if any supportable human life is to go on. Treaties and mutual
guarantees are not enough. We have surely learnt enough about the value of
treaties during the last half-century to realise that. We have, because of
the abolition of distance alone, to gather human affairs together under
one common war-preventing control.

But this abolition of
distance is only one most vivid aspect of the change in the conditions of
human life. Interwoven with that is a general change of scale in human
operations. The past hundred years has been an age of invention and
discovery beyond the achievements of the preceding three millennia. In a
book I published eight years ago, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of
Mankind, I tried to summarise the conquest of power and substances that is
still going on. There is more power expended in a modern city like
Birmingham in a day than we need to keep the whole of Elizabethan England
going for a year; there is more destructive energy in a single tank than
sufficed the army of William I for the conquest of England. Man is able
now to produce or destroy on a scale beyond comparison greater than he
could before this storm of invention began. And the consequence is the
continual further dislocation of the orderly social life of our
great-great-grandfathers. No trade, no profession, is exempt. The old
social routines and classifications have been, as people say,
"knocked silly". There is no sort of occupation, fisheries,
farming, textile work, metal work, mining which is not suffering from
constant readjustment to new methods and facilities. Our traditions of
trade and distribution flounder after these changes. Skilled occupations
disappear in the general liquefaction.

The new power
organisations are destroying the forests of the world at headlong speed,
ploughing great grazing areas into deserts, exhausting mineral resources,
killing off whales, seals and a multitude of rare and beautiful species,
destroying the morale of every social type and devastating the planet. The
institutions of the private appropriation of land and natural resources
generally, and of private enterprise for profit, which did produce a
fairly tolerable, stable and "civilised" social life for all but
the most impoverished, in Europe, America and East, for some centuries,
have been expanded to a monstrous destructiveness by the new
opportunities. The patient, nibbling, enterprising profit-seeker of the
past, magnified and equipped now with the huge claws and teeth the change
of scale has provided for him, has torn the old economic order to rags.
Quite apart from war, our planet is being wasted and disorganised. Yet the
process goes on, without any general control, more monstrously destructive
even than the continually enhanced terrors of modern warfare.

Now it has to be made
clear that these two things, the manifest necessity for some collective
world control to eliminate warfare and the less generally admitted
necessity for a collective control of the economic and biological life of
mankind, are aspects of one and the same process. Of the two the
disorganisation of the ordinary life which is going on, war or no war, is
the graver and least reversible. Both arise out of the abolition of
distance and the change of scale, they affect and modify each other, and
unless their parallelism and interdependence are recognised, any projects
for world federation or anything of the sort are doomed inevitably to
frustration.

That is where the League
of nations broke down completely. It was legal; it was political. It was
devised by an ex-professor of the old-fashioned history assisted by a few
politicians. It ignored the vast disorganisation of human life by
technical revolutions, big business and modern finance that was going on,
of which the Great War itself was scarcely more than a by-product. It was
constituted as though nothing of that sort was occurring.

This war storm which is
breaking upon us now, due to the continued fragmentation of human
government among a patchwork of sovereign states, is only one aspect of
the general need for a rational consolidation of human affairs. The
independent sovereign state with its perpetual war threat, armed with the
resources of modern mechanical frightfulness, is only the most blatant and
terrifying aspect of that same want of a coherent general control that
makes overgrown, independent, sovereign, private business organisations
and combinations, socially destructive. We should still be at the mercy of
the "Napoleons" of commerce and the "Attilas" of
finance, if there was not a gun or a battleship or a tank or a military
uniform in the world. We should still be sold up and dispossessed.

Political federation, we
have to realise, without a concurrent economic collectivisation, is bound
to fail. The task of the peace-maker who really desires peace in a new
world, involves not merely a political but a profound social revolution,
profounder even than the revolution attempted by the Communists in Russia.
The Russian Revolution failed not by its extremism but through the
impatience, violence and intolerance of its onset, through lack of
foresight and intellectual insufficiency. The cosmopolitan revolution to a
world collectivism, which is the only alternative to chaos and
degeneration before mankind, has to go much further than the Russian; it
has to be more thorough and better conceived and its achievement demands a
much more heroic and more steadfast thrust.

It serves no useful
purpose to shut our eyes to the magnitude and intricacy of the task of
making the world peace. These are the basic factors of the case.

4

CLASS-WAR

NOW HERE IT IS necessary
to make a distinction which is far too frequently ignored.
Collectivisation means the handling of the common affairs of mankind by a
common control responsible to the whole community. It means the
suppression of go-as-you-please in social and economic affairs just as
much as in international affairs. It means the frank abolition of
profit-seeking and of every devise by which human+beings contrive to be
parasitic on their fellow man. It is the practical realisation of the
brotherhood of man through a common control. It means all that and it
means no more than that.

The necessary nature of
that control, the way to attain it and to maintain it have still to be
discussed.

The early forms of
socialism were attempts to think out and try out collectivist systems. But
with the advent of Marxism, the larger idea of collectivism became
entangled with a smaller one, the perpetual conflict of people in any
unregulated social system to get the better of one another. Throughout the
ages this has been going on. The rich, the powerful generally, the more
intelligent and acquisitive have got away with things, and sweated,
oppressed, enslaved, bought and frustrated the less intelligent, the less
acquisitive and the unwary. The Haves in every generation have always got
the better of the Have-nots, and the Have-nots have always resented the
privations of their disadvantage.

So it is and so in the
uncollectivised world it has always been. The bitter cry of the
expropriated man echoes down the ages from ancient Egypt and the Hebrew
prophets, denouncing those who grind the faces of the poor. At times the
Have-nots have been so uneducated, so helplessly distributed among their
more successful fellows that they have been incapable of social
disturbance, but whenever such developments as plantation of factory
labour, the accumulation of men in seaport towns, the disbanding of
armies, famine and so forth, brought together masses of men at the same
disadvantage, their individual resentments flowed together and became a
common resentment. The miseries underlying human society were revealed.
The Haves found themselves assailed by resentful, vindictive revolt.

Let us note that these
revolts of the Have-nots throughout the ages have sometimes been very
destructive, but that invariably they have failed to make any fundamental
change in this old, old story of getting and not getting the upper hand.
Sometimes the Have-nots have frightened or otherwise moved the Haves to
more decent behaviour. Often the Have-nots have found a Champion who has
ridden to power on their wrongs. Then the ricks were burnt or the
châteaux. The aristocrats were guillotined and their heads carried on
exemplary pikes. Such storms passed and when they passed, there for all
practical purposes was the old order returning again; new people but the
old inequalities. Returning inevitably, with only slight variations in
appearance and phraseology, under the condition of a non-collective social
order.

The point to note is that
in the unplanned scramble of human life through the centuries of the
horse-and-foot period, these incessantly recurring outbreaks of the losers
against the winners have never once produced any permanent amelioration of
the common lot, or greatly changed the features of the human community.
Not once.

The Have-nots have never
produced the intelligence and the ability and the Haves have never
produced the conscience, to make a permanent alteration of the rules of
the game. Slave revolts, peasant revolts, revolts of the proletariat have
always been fits of rage, acute social fevers which have passed. The fact
remains that history produces no reason for supposing that the Have-nots,
considered as a whole, have available any reserves of directive and
administrative capacity and disinterested devotion, superior to that of
the more successful classes. Morally, intellectually, there is no reason
to suppose them better.

Many potentially able
people may miss education and opportunity; they may not be inherently
inferior but nevertheless they are crippled and incapacitated and kept
down. They are spoilt. Many specially gifted people may fail to "make
good" in a jostling, competitive, acquisitive world and so fall into
poverty and into the baffled, limited ways of living of the commonalty,
but they too are exceptions. The idea of a right-minded Proletariat ready
to take things over is a dream.

As the collectivist idea
has developed out of the original propositions of socialism, the more
lucid thinkers have put this age-long bitterness of the Haves and the
Have-nots into its proper place as part, as the most distressing part, but
still only as part, of the vast wastage of human resources that their
disorderly exploitation entailed. In the light of current events they have
come to realise more and more clearly that the need and possibility of
arresting this waste by a world-wide collectivisation is becoming
continually more possible and at the same time imperative. They have had
no delusions about the education and liberation that is necessary to gain
that end. They have been moved less by moral impulses and sentimental pity
and so forth, admirable but futile motives, as by the intense intellectual
irritation of living in a foolish and destructive system. They are
revolutionaries not because the present way of living is a hard and
tyrannous way of living, but because it is from top to bottom
exasperatingly stupid.

But thrusting athwart the
socialist movement towards collectivisation and its research for some
competent directive organisation of the world’s affairs, came the clumsy
initiative of Marxism with its class-war dogma, which has done more to
misdirect and sterilise human good-will than any other misconception of
reality that has ever stultified human effort.

Marx saw the world from a
study and through the hazes of a vast ambition. He swam in the current
ideologies of his time and so he shared the prevalent socialist drive
towards collectivisation. But while his sounder-minded contemporaries were
studying means and ends he jumped from a very imperfect understanding of
the Trades Union movement in Britain to the wildest generalisations about
the social process. He invented and antagonised two phantoms. One was the
Capitalist System; the other the Worker.

There never has been
anything on earth that could be properly called a Capitalist System. What
was the matter with his world was manifestly its entire want of system.
What the Socialists were feeling their way towards was the discovery and
establishment of a world system.

The Haves of our period
were and are a fantastic miscellany of people, inheriting or getting their
power and influence by the most various of the interbreeding social
solidarity even of a feudal aristocracy or an Indian caste. But Marx,
looking rather into his inner consciousness than at any concrete reality,
evolved that monster "System" on his Right. Then over against
it, still gazing into that vacuum, he discovered on the Left the
proletarians being steadily expropriated and becoming class-conscious.
They were just as endlessly various in reality as the people at the top of
the scramble; in reality but not in the mind of the Communist seer. There
they consolidated rapidly.

So while other men toiled
at this gigantic problem of collectivisation, Marx found his almost
childlishy simple recipe. All you had to do was to tell the workers that
they were being robbed and enslaved by this wicked "Capitalist
System" devised by the "bourgeoisie". They need only
"unite"; they had "nothing to lose but their chains".
The wicked Capitalist System was to be overthrown, with a certain
vindictive liquidation of "capitalists" in general and the
"bourgeoisie" in particular, and a millennium would ensue under
a purely workers’ control, which Lenin later on was to crystallise into
a phrase of supra-theological mystery, "the dictatorship of the
proletariat". The proletarians need learn nothing, plan nothing; they
were right and good by nature; they would just "take over". The
infinitely various envies, hatreds and resentments of the Have-nots were
to fuse into a mighty creative drive. All virtue resided in them; all evil
in those who had bettered them. One good thing there was in this new
doctrine of the class war, it inculcated a much needed brotherliness among
the workers, but it was balanced by the organisation of class hate. So the
great propaganda of the class war, with these monstrous falsifications of
manifest fact, went forth. Collectivisation would not so much be organised
as appear magically when the incubus of Capitalism and all those
irritatingly well-to-do people, were lifted off the great Proletarian
soul.

Marx was a man incapable
in money matters and much bothered by tradesmen’s bills. Moreover he
cherished absurd pretensions to aristocracy. The consequence was that he
romanced about the lovely life of the Middle Ages as if he were another
Belloc and concentrated his animus about the "bourgeoisie", whom
he made responsible for all those great disruptive forces in human society
that we have considered. Lord Bacon, the Marquis of Worcester, Charles the
Second and the Royal Society, people like Cavendish and Joule and Watt for
example, all became "bourgeoisie" in his inflamed imagination.
"During its reign of scarce a century", he wrote in the
Communist Manifesto, "the bourgeoisie has created more powerful, more
stupendous forces of production than all preceding generations rolled into
one . . . . What earlier generations had the remotest inkling that such
productive forces slumbered within the wombs of associated labour?"

"The wombs of
associated labour!" (Golly, what a phrase!) The industrial revolution
which was a consequence of the mechanical revolution is treated as the
cause of it. Could facts be muddled more completely?

And again: " . . .
the bourgeois system is no longer able to cope with the abundance of
wealth it creates. How does the bourgeoisie overcome these crises? On the
one hand, by the compulsory annihilation of a quantity of the productive
forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough
exploitation of old ones. With what results? The results are that the way
is paved for more widespread and more disastrous crises and that the
capacity for averting such crises is lessened.

"The weapons"
(Weapons! How that sedentary gentleman in his vast beard adored military
images!) "with which the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism are now
being turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

"But the bourgeoisie
has not only forged the weapons that will slay it; it has also engendered
the men who will use these weapons - the modern workers, the
proletarians."

And so here they are,
hammer and sickle in hand, chest stuck out, proud, magnificent,
commanding, in the Manifesto. But go and look for them yourself in the
streets. Go and look at them in Russia.

Even for 1848 this is not
intelligent social analysis. It is the outpouring of a man with a B in his
bonnet, the hated Bourgeoisie, a man with a certain vision, uncritical of
his own sub-conscious prejudices, but shrewd enough to realise how great a
driving force is hate and the inferiority complex. Shrewd enough to use
hate and bitter enough to hate. Let anyone read over that Communist
Manifesto and consider who might have shared the hate or even have got it
all, if Marx had not been the son of a rabbi. Read Jews for Bourgeoisie
and the Manifesto is pure Nazi teaching of the 1933-8 vintage.

Stripped down to its core
in this fashion, the primary falsity of the Marxist assumption is evident.
But it is one of the queer common weakness of the human mind to be
uncritical of primary assumptions and to smother up any enquiry into their
soundness in secondary elaboration, in technicalities and conventional
formulæ. Most of our systems of belief rest upon rotten foundations, and
generally these foundations are made sacred to preserve them from attack.
They become dogmas in a sort of holy of holies. It is shockingly uncivil
to say "But that is nonsense". The defenders of all the dogmatic
religions fly into rage and indignation when one touches on the absurdity
of their foundations. Especially if one laughs. That is blasphemy.

This avoidance of
fundamental criticism is one of the greatest dangers to any general human
understanding. Marxism is no exception to the universal tendency. The
Capitalist System has to be a real system, the Bourgeoisie an organised
conspiracy against the Workers, and every human conflict everywhere has to
be an aspect of the Class War, or they cannot talk to you. They will not
listen to you. Never once has there been an attempt to answer the plain
things I have been saying about them for a third of a century. Anything
not in their language flows off their minds like water off a duck’s
back. Even Lenin - by far the subtlest mind in the Communist story - has
not escaped this pitfall, and when I talked to him in Moscow in 1920 he
seemed quite unable to realise that the violent conflict going on in
Ireland between the Catholic nationalists and the Protestant garrison was
not his sacred insurrection of the Proletariat in full blast.

To-day there is quite a
number of writers, and among them there are men of science who ought to
think better, solemnly elaborating a pseudo-philosophy of science and
society upon the deeply buried but entirely nonsensical foundations laid
by Marx. Month by month the industrious Left book Club pours a new volume
over the minds of its devotees to sustain their mental habits and pickle
them against the septic influence of unorthodox literature. A party Index
of Forbidden Books will no doubt follow. Distinguished professors with
solemn delight in their own remarkable ingenuity, lecture and discourse
and even produce serious-looking volumes, upon the superiority of Marxist
physics and Marxist research, to the unbranded activities of the human
mind. One tries not to be rude to them, but it is hard to believe they are
not deliberately playing the fool with their brains. Or have they a
feeling that revolutionary communism is ahead, and are they doing their
best to rationalise it with an eye to those red days to come? (See
Hogben’s Dangerous Thoughts.)

Here I cannot pursue in
any detail the story of the Rise and Corruption of Marxism in Russia. It
confirms in every particular my contention that the class-war idea is an
entanglement and perversion of the world drive towards a world
collectivism, a wasting disease of cosmopolitan socialism. It has followed
in its general outline the common history of every revolt of the Have-nots
since history began. Russia in the shadows displayed an immense
inefficiency and sank slowly to Russia in the dark. Its galaxy of
incompetent foremen, managers, organisers and so forth, developed the most
complicated system of self-protection against criticism, they sabotaged
one another, they intrigued against one another. You can read the
quintessence of the thing in Littlepage’s In Search of Soviet Gold. And
like every other Have-not revolt since the dawn of history, hero worship
took possession of the insurgent masses. The inevitable Champion appeared.
They escape from the Czar and in twenty years they are worshipping Stalin,
originally a fairly honest, unoriginal, ambitious revolutionary, driven to
self-defensive cruelty and inflated by flattery to his present
quasi-divine autocracy. The cycle completes itself and we see that like
every other merely insurrectionary revolution, nothing has changed; a lot
of people have been liquidated and a lot of other people have replaced
them and Russia seems returning back to the point at which it started, to
a patriotic absolutism of doubtful efficiency and vague, incalculable
aims. Stalin, I believe, is honest and benevolent in intention, he
believes in collectivism simply and plainly, he is still under the
impression that he is making a good thing of Russia and of the countries
within her sphere of influence, and he is self-righteously impatient of
criticism or opposition. His successor may not have the same
disinterestedness.

But I have written enough
to make it clear why we have to dissociate collectivisation altogether
from the class war in our minds. Let us waste no more time on the
spectacle of the Marxist putting the cart in front of the horse and tying
himself up with the harness. We have to put all this proletarian
distortion of the case out of our minds and start afresh upon the problem
of how to realise the new and unprecedented possibilities of world
collectivisation that have opened out upon the world in the past hundred
years. That is a new story. An entirely different story.

We human+beings are
facing gigantic forces that will either destroy our species altogether or
lift it to an altogether unprecedented level of power and well-being.
These forces have to be controlled or we shall be annihilated. But
completely controlled they can abolish slavery - by the one sure means of
making these things unnecessary. Class-war communism has its opportunity
to realise all this, and it has failed to make good. So far it has only
replaced one autocratic Russia by another. Russia, like all the rest of
the world, is still facing the problem of the competent government of a
collective system. She has not solved it.

The dictatorship of the
proletariat has failed us. We have to look for possibilities of control in
other directions. Are they to be found?

NOTE

A friendly adviser
reading the passage on p.47 protests against "the wombs of associated
labour" as a mistranslation of the original German of the Manifesto.
I took it from the translation of Professor Hirendranath Mukherjee in an
Indian students’ journal, Sriharsha, which happened to be at my desk.
But my adviser produces Lily G. Aitken and Frank C. Budgen in a Glasgow
Socialist Labour Press publication, who gave it as "the lap of social
labour", which is more refined but pure nonsense. The German word is
"schoss", and in its widest sense it means the whole productive
maternal outfit from bosom to knees and here quite definitely the womb.
The French translation gives "sein", which at the first glance
seems to carry gentility to an even higher level. But as you can say in
French that an expectant mother carries her child in her "sein",
I think Professor Mukherjee has it. Thousands of reverent young Communists
must have read that "lap" without observing its absurdity. Marx
is trying to make out that the increase of productive efficiency was due
to "association" in factories. A better phrase to express his
(wrong-headed) intention would have been "the co-ordinated operations
of workers massed in factories".